“Astor describes Jupiter as a jungle world teeming with flesh-eating plants, blood-sucking bats, giant snakes and flying lizards. It’s also rich in resources – iron, silver, gold, lead, copper, coal, and oil – which the Americans (now a multi-continent superpower) are quick to exploit. In contrast to Jupiter’s visceral environment of dangerous creatures and money-making minerals, Saturn is an ancient world of silent spirits which provide Astor’s explorers with foresight into their own deaths. Astor himself was to meet an untimely end, being one of the 1,514 people who perished in the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15th 1912.” (via)